清影

Inna Art Space is pleased to present “Intimate Thorn”, a solo exhibition by Li Yifan, on view from May 16 to June 30, 2026. The exhibition brings together Li’s recent paintings and, for the first time, extends the variously shaped “thorns” in her work into physical space through a group of copper thorn sculptures.

The images that appear in Li Yifan’s paintings are often bodies, plants, water, thorns, conch shells, and eyes. Yet these forms do not correspond to a single symbolic meaning, nor do they serve a fixed narrative. Rather, they appear as interrelated life forms growing out of the same pictorial surface, held together by the shifting relations between color, line, edge, and layered surfaces. In her work, the body is not a stable subject, but a site of perception, transformation, approach, and withdrawal.

“Intimate Thorn” takes as one of its points of departure Li’s observation of roses: thorns are not yet hardened and may even be tender and fleshy on a newly sprout branch, yet they already introduce a measure of distance into  the act of touch. This subtle natural experience offers an important entry point into Li’s paintings. For the artist, intimacy is never a purely gentle or seamless state of fusion; it is always accompanied by sensitivity, defense, pain, and the emergence of boundaries.

Inna Art Space is pleased to present “Intimate Thorn”, a solo exhibition by Li Yifan, on view from May 16 to June 30, 2026. The exhibition brings together Li’s recent paintings and, for the first time, extends the variously shaped “thorns” in her work into physical space through a group of copper thorn sculptures.

The images that appear in Li Yifan’s paintings are often bodies, plants, water, thorns, conch shells, and eyes. Yet these forms do not correspond to a single symbolic meaning, nor do they serve a fixed narrative. Rather, they appear as interrelated life forms growing out of the same pictorial surface, held together by the shifting relations between color, line, edge, and layered surfaces. In her work, the body is not a stable subject, but a site of perception, transformation, approach, and withdrawal.

“Intimate Thorn” takes as one of its points of departure Li’s observation of roses: thorns are not yet hardened and may even be tender and fleshy on a newly sprout branch, yet they already introduce a measure of distance into  the act of touch. This subtle natural experience offers an important entry point into Li’s paintings. For the artist, intimacy is never a purely gentle or seamless state of fusion; it is always accompanied by sensitivity, defense, pain, and the emergence of boundaries.

In Li’s work, sensation is not a direct eruption of emotion, but a perceptual structure gradually organized within painting itself. Through layered color, loosened contours, displaced edges, and traces of incompletion, she keeps the image in a state of becoming. Bodies, plants, and water do not remain separate in her paintings; instead, they permeate one another within a humid, fluid, almost dreamlike space. 

The copper thorn sculptures in this exhibition transform the thorn from a pictorial motif into a material presence in real space. They reconstruct the distance between the viewer and the work, making looking not only an act of facing an image, but also a bodily experience of approaching, circling, pausing, and withdrawing. 

Between painting and sculpture, “Intimate Thorn” does not offer an explanation of intimacy. Rather, it constructs a site of distance, perception, and bodily boundaries. What viewers encounter is not only the body within the image, but also their own hesitation, sense of measure, and judgment as they move closer to the work.

The curatorial concept text by SIQI MA (North) unfolds as a fable about a people who live by the water. Their bodies are soft, porous, and closely connected to mist, plants, water, and dreams. When intimacy first appears, their bodies begin to grow a second skin: small thorns emerge from their most sensitive places.

The thorn in this story is neither a punishment nor a refusal of love. It gives form to the boundary that appears within intimacy. To be close to another does not mean to disappear into them; intimacy becomes a careful negotiation between softness and defense, longing and pain, approach and withdrawal.

The text does not seek to explain Li Yifan’s paintings directly. Instead, it offers an imaginative threshold into the exhibition, echoing the bodies, water, plants, and thorn-like forms that recur throughout her work. It suggests that intimacy is not an escape from the world, but a way for the body to encounter its own unfinished, vulnerable, and perceptive state within it.

Text by SIQI MA (North)

The curatorial concept text by SIQI MA (North) unfolds as a fable about a people who live by the water. Their bodies are soft, porous, and closely connected to mist, plants, water, and dreams. When intimacy first appears, their bodies begin to grow a second skin: small thorns emerge from their most sensitive places.

The thorn in this story is neither a punishment nor a refusal of love. It gives form to the boundary that appears within intimacy. To be close to another does not mean to disappear into them; intimacy becomes a careful negotiation between softness and defense, longing and pain, approach and withdrawal.

The text does not seek to explain Li Yifan’s paintings directly. Instead, it offers an imaginative threshold into the exhibition, echoing the bodies, water, plants, and thorn-like forms that recur throughout her work. It suggests that intimacy is not an escape from the world, but a way for the body to encounter its own unfinished, vulnerable, and perceptive state within it.

Text by SIQI MA (North)

Once, long ago, a certain people lived by the water.

They were born drawn to water—or rather, only in dampness did they feel truly alive. By day, they were no different from anyone else: they walked, labored, spoke or silent, their bodies clearly contoured, and their shadows resting steadily on the ground. But as evening came and mist rose from the water’s surface, their bodies began to soften, as if slowly dissolved by the night. Arms, backs, waists—first losing their hard edges, then their outlines gradually loosening, as though the skin no longer contained only the self, but began to seep into the surrounding air, the ripples of water, the blades of grass, and the realm of dreams.

In the tales, that before they first fall in love, their bodies had always been like this

— soft as water, without fixed contours. In those days, people knew nothing of boundaries, nor defense. One’s breath could easily mingle with the night wind; fingers were twisted with waterweeds, and backs were overlapping with river bend. The body was merely a passage through which the flowed of sensation, instead of a vessel tightly sealed. And so they drew close to all things, and were in turn passed through by all things. They lay prostrate on the riverbank, as if asleep, or as if listening to sounds rising from the underwater.

Until one day, people began to fall in love.

Though no one knows how ‘love’ first came to be. Perhaps because the nights were too cold, and the chill rising from the water forced them to draw close to one another. Or maybe they had synchronous by the water for so long that they gradually forgot they were not originally the same as the other. Instinctively, they started to be eager to approach a body like their own. All in all, it happened. At an uncertain time, first night, first person touched another’s shoulder. The other did not pull away.

Thus, for the first time in the world, intimacy appeared.

That night, their skin began growing for a second time.

This second growth did not make the body thicker or harder. Instead, it allowed previously invisible boundaries to slowly emerge. Therefore, some people grew tiny thorns along their shoulder blades; others, on their elbows, waists, armpits, or knees— tiny, glowing thorns started to appear. These thorns were not large nor fatal, but to manifest that the body learned to draw close did not mean to vanish into the other. For the first time, people living by the water knew that, there were parts of themselves could not be pierced through.

Time flies, by the water, those people learned to live with the thorns.

They still needed one another, still drew close at night and searched for the warmth of another body when the mist gradually thickened. However, nowadays they no longer melted into each other as boundlessly as before. They learned to use soft places to touch others soft places, and also to turn slightly aside where the thorns had grown. Intimacy became a fine and delicate modulation: a coming near, a flinching away; an attachment, a pang; an engulfment, a glance back. None of the motion was redundant, and none truly led to safety.

As the time passed, misunderstandings and suspicions began to harbored in outsiders’ thought.

Seeing those bodies lying prostrate in the shallows, thorns jutting out among grass and leaves, flesh blending with blossoms, water-ripples, and shadows, they assumed these people were trapped in brambles. Others said they have sinned, and were punished by being covered in thorns, so that they could never embrace one another without hurt. Only those living by the water knew the truth: it was not that they had wandered into the thorns. Rather, intimacy itself had finally grown a shape within their bodies.

Later, some of them left the water’s edge.

But that place was never an other shore standing in opposition to reality. The world has always been one. It is not a mythical elsewhere, nor a place where the body might temporarily escape to. It is simple, within this same world, a site where dampness, touch, boundaries, and sensation reveal themselves earlier. And so, when those who had grown a second skin moved into other places to continue their lives, even if by day they looked like everyone else, at night or in dreams the dampness would rise again through hazy colors. Thorns would glow once more from old wounds and new touches. Bodies would again lose their stable outlines. Some lay prostrate, some curled up, and some, in states that could not be clearly named or described, lay back down upon that thorny marshland.

Thorns bear no malice. They do not refuse love, nor can they put an end to closeness. They stand for neither punishment nor comfort. But they showed this: intimacy has never been merely a tender, hollow word. Within every person, two bodies live at once: one with clear contours and distinct boundaries; and the other one, soft, loose, still like water. Perhaps what intimacy draws near is not only another person, but also that territory within one’s own body— unfinished, unfixed, not yet truly known. And that is why intimacy always arrives together with pain, sensitivity, defense, and longing. It is not an escape into another world, but the moment, in this world, when the body truly support or accept itself for the first time.

Text by SIQI MA (North)

Bodies, thorned branches, water, fruits, conch shells, eyes … Li Yifan’s paintings readily invite interpretation. These images recur throughout her work, carrying associations that feel almost predetermined, as if naturally waiting to be named: the body may be read through identity, the thorn through harm or defense, water through consciousness, plants through life and growth. Such interpretive paths are always close at hand, and they arrive too quickly. Once one follows them, painting can easily be absorbed into familiar systems of meaning, becoming the counterpart of an idea, a narrative, or an emotion, rather than taking place as painting itself. This is where one must first slow down when entering Li Yifan’s work.

Li Yifan grows roses. In the process of their growth, she observed that new shoots already bear thorns when they first emerge. At that stage, the thorns are not yet hard. On the contrary, they are tender, almost succulent to the touch, bright red against the green of the young stems. A sense of danger has not yet fully formed, but the sign of what may one day prick the hand has already appeared. This experience from nature offers a more precise entry into the exhibition’s title. “Intimate Thorn” does not seek to turn softness and sharpness into a symbolic opposition. The thorns on young rose shoots suggest an earlier, more ambiguous state: even before the thorn matures, touch has already acquired a sense of measure.

Text by SIQI MA (North)

Bodies, thorned branches, water, fruits, conch shells, eyes … Li Yifan’s paintings readily invite interpretation. These images recur throughout her work, carrying associations that feel almost predetermined, as if naturally waiting to be named: the body may be read through identity, the thorn through harm or defense, water through consciousness, plants through life and growth. Such interpretive paths are always close at hand, and they arrive too quickly. Once one follows them, painting can easily be absorbed into familiar systems of meaning, becoming the counterpart of an idea, a narrative, or an emotion, rather than taking place as painting itself. This is where one must first slow down when entering Li Yifan’s work.

Li Yifan grows roses. In the process of their growth, she observed that new shoots already bear thorns when they first emerge. At that stage, the thorns are not yet hard. On the contrary, they are tender, almost succulent to the touch, bright red against the green of the young stems. A sense of danger has not yet fully formed, but the sign of what may one day prick the hand has already appeared. This experience from nature offers a more precise entry into the exhibition’s title. “Intimate Thorn” does not seek to turn softness and sharpness into a symbolic opposition. The thorns on young rose shoots suggest an earlier, more ambiguous state: even before the thorn matures, touch has already acquired a sense of measure.

This point of entry need not be pushed further. What matters more is how Li transforms this observation from nature into painting. In her work, the body is not placed before a clearly defined background, nor do plants, water, conch shells, or thorns function as background elements. There is no stable hierarchy among these images. Rather, they seem to grow out of the same pictorial surface as different parts of a shared field. At times, a form appears on the verge of emerging, only to be pressed back down by layers of color, as if beneath a translucent film. At other times, the contour of a body seems about to connect, yet loosens just as it approaches the edge. All these elements organize the picture with a comparable degree of intensity. As a result, when looking at Li’s paintings, it is often difficult to remain fixed on a single focal point. The eye is led toward the surrounding areas, the edges, the gaps, and the local details, moving as if through an environment that resists immediate measurement. Li herself has said that she does not want a painting to end with “a very specific person painted at the center.” Instead, she attempts to let figures merge into their environments, forming a presence that requires the painting to be seen as a whole. Yet this wholeness does not mean that the picture is smoothly unified. On the contrary, it relies precisely on differences and displacements among its parts to sustain tension. Li clearly has no wish to return to the standardized proportions of the academic body. In her paintings, the body may be elongated, stretched, curled, or subtly deformed, becoming a site that bears its environment, adjusts its posture, and searches for balance.

This is also what distinguishes Li’s work from a generalized lyricism. She does not reject softness or beauty, but she resists having the painting reduced to prettiness. In a pre-exhibition interview, she noted that nature possesses not only an outward beauty, but also conflict and sharpness; for this reason, she hopes her paintings can be “softly beautiful, but with a small thorn.” The statement may sound light, yet it comes close to the core of her painting: the picture may be expansive and gentle, but it cannot lose its edge. It cannot remain at the level of atmosphere alone.

Unlike artists who construct narratives through images, Li does not attempt to use images to explain a clearly defined theme, nor is she eager to organize them into a story that can be told. Rather than asking “what do these images mean” or “what do they form when placed together,” she is more concerned with how an image acquires position, texture, and force within painting. In this sense, her work is closer to an inquiry into sensation. Here, “sensation” is not feeling in the general sense—not an emotion or personal experience that the artist can directly state. It is closer to a perceptual condition gradually organized within painting through color, form, edge, and spatial relations.

We often assume that feeling is not sufficient grounds for a work to stand, because it can too easily be understood as a vague personal experience, or as a way for the artist to avoid explanation. But in Li’s work, feeling is not a vague alibi. It is the very object that must be repeatedly organized, adjusted, and confirmed within the painting. It is gradually established through the relations among color, form, edge, and space. If we briefly return to the Chinese term “ganjue,” the Shuowen Jiezi defines gan as “that which moves the heart,” emphasizing the way external things touch the mind; “jue” means “to awaken,” or to become clear. Seen in this way, feeling is not an already completed psychological content, but a dynamic process in which a certain touch gradually becomes perceptible and visible over time. It is the result of the artist’s repeated calibration within the painting.

Returning to the surface of the works, Li often preserves traces that appear unfinished or close to a sketch. She refers to them as the “pores” of the painting, like the breathing pores of a plant. She believes that once every part of the picture is filled and every image has been put in order, the painting loses the space to continue breathing. She therefore chooses to preserve these gaps, preventing the image from being fully sealed and allowing the viewer places to enter again and again. In the studio, some works may be set aside for a long time. This does not mean they have been abandoned by the artist, but that they are waiting for a moment when she can enter them once more. She describes this as the painting seemingly telling her that it is “almost there,” or reminding her that a certain place still needs the lightest additional stroke. This may sound somewhat mysterious, but it is not difficult to understand: Li’s painterly judgments often occur before language. This connects directly with the idea of sensation discussed above. Sensation is not the origin of the painting, but the judgment that becomes visible when the painting has reached a certain state.

For this exhibition, Li has also made a group of copper thorn sculptures. This gesture extends such judgment from the plane into space. The thorns in the paintings originally depend on sight and imagination; the copper thorns, by contrast, possess volume, a cold and hard materiality, and a tactile sense of danger. They alter the viewer’s distance from the “thorn” in space. The viewer does not merely see the thorn, but must also become aware of how the body approaches it, moves around it, and maintains a measure of intimacy in relation to it.

Before writing this essay, I wrote a fable-like concept text for Yifan. Yet it needs to be stated and emphasized once again that “Intimate Thorn” is ultimately neither an explanation of the thorn nor a fable about intimacy. It is more like a narrow path into Li Yifan’s painting than a method of interpretation or summary. As viewers move among the works, I hope they will see how these recurring images gain new positions in different paintings, and how they participate in forming the internal order of each individual work. A work does not always come into being after meaning has been assigned. It can first stand through its own color, texture, and relations. If meaning exists, it should grow out of these painterly facts, rather than being framed and determined in advance.